Bernie Masters is a geologist/zoologist who spent 8 years as a member of the Western Australian Parliament. Married to Carolina since 1976 and living in south west WA, Bernie is involved in many community groups. This blog offers insights into politics, the environment and other issues that annoy or interest him. For something completely different, visit www.fiatechnology.com.au for information about vegetated floating islands - the natural way to improve water quality.

Monday, June 11, 2018

Dangerous people are teaching our kids - Jordan Peterson

You may not realize it, but you are currently funding some dangerous people.

They are indoctrinating young minds throughout the West with their
resentment-ridden ideology. They have made it their life's mission to
undermine Western civilization itself, which they regard as corrupt,
oppressive and “patriarchal.”

If you're a taxpayer—or paying for your kid's liberal arts degree—you're underwriting this gang of nihilists.

You're supporting ideologues who claim that all truth is subjective;
that all sex differences are socially constructed; and that Western
imperialism is the sole source of all Third World problems. They are the
post-modernists, pushing “progressive” activism at a college near you.

They produce the mobs that violently shut down campus speakers; the
language police who enshrine into law use of fabricated gender pronouns;
and the deans whose livelihoods depend on madly rooting out
discrimination where little or none exists.

Their thinking took hold in Western universities in the ‘60s and ‘70s,
when the true believers of the radical left became the professors of
today. And now we rack up education-related debt—not so that our
children learn to think critically, write clearly, or speak properly,
but so they can model their mentors' destructive agenda.

It's now possible to complete an English degree and never encounter
Shakespeare—one of those dead white males whose works underlie our
“society of oppression.”

To understand and oppose the post-modernists, the ideas by which they orient themselves must be clearly identified.

First is their new unholy trinity of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Diversity is defined not by opinion, but by race, ethnicity or sexual
identity; equity is no longer the laudable goal of equality of
opportunity, but the insistence on equality of outcome; and inclusion is
the use of identity-based quotas to attain this misconceived state of
equity.

All the classic rights of the West are to be considered secondary to
these new values. Take, for example, freedom of speech—the very pillar
of democracy. The post-modernists refuse to believe that people of good
will can exchange ideas and reach consensus.

Their world is instead a Hobbesian nightmare of identity groups warring
for power. They don't see ideas that run contrary to their ideology as
simply incorrect. They see them as integral to the oppressive system
they wish to supplant, and consider it a moral obligation to stifle and
constrain their expression.

Second is rejection of the free market—of the very idea that free,
voluntary trading benefits everyone. They won't acknowledge that
capitalism has lifted up hundreds of millions of people so they can for
the first time in history afford food, shelter, clothing,
transportation—even entertainment and travel. Those classified as poor
in the US (and, increasingly, everywhere else) are able to meet their
basic needs. Meanwhile, in once-prosperous Venezuela—until recently the
poster-child of the campus radicals—the middle class lines up for toilet
paper.

Third, and finally, are the politics of identity. Post-modernists don't
believe in individuals. You're an exemplar of your race, sex, or sexual
preference. You're also either a victim or an oppressor. No wrong can
be done by anyone in the former group, and no good by the latter. Such
ideas of victimization do nothing but justify the use of power and
engender intergroup conflict.
All these concepts originated with Karl Marx, the 19th-century German
philosopher. Marx viewed the world as a gigantic class struggle—the
bourgeoisie against the proletariat; the grasping rich against the
desperate poor. But wherever his ideas were put into practice—in the
Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, and Cambodia, to name just a few—whole
economies failed, and tens of millions were killed. We fought a
decades-long cold war to stop the spread of those murderous notions. But
they're back, in the new guise of identity politics.

The corrupt ideas of the post-modern neo-Marxists should be consigned
to the dustbin of history. Instead, we underwrite their continuance in
the very institutions where the central ideas of the West should be
transmitted across the generations. Unless we stop, post-modernism will
do to America and the entire Western world what it's already done to its
universities.

I'm Jordan Peterson, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, for Prager University.